Humans are pretty simple creatures in some ways. How do you get them to respect, revere, honor, write books about, fight over, and most importantly preserve a simple book for 1,200+ years while refering to it in such ways as “a chief relic of the Western world”?
Apparently a good recipe is to simply [it’s really not that simple, of course] create an extremely high quality version of your important religious texts on the highest quality vellum, using only absolutely masterful calligraphy, and highly ornate and colorfully illuminated hand-made illustrations. Yep, that is the whole formula.
It seems the book was so obviously valuable that it may have even survived Viking pillages at the beginning of the 9th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells
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